The Treasury of Laughs was compiled by Feng Menglong in the 1610s. It includes more than 700 humorous skits and jokes from elite and popular sources, rewriting some of them to give the volume a kind of aesthetic and stylistic coherence.

What does it mean to be young? Mingwei Song‘s new book explores this question in the context of a careful study of the nature and significance of the discourse of youth in modern China. Young China: National Rejuvenation and the Bildungsroman,

Stephen L. Field‘s new translation and study of the Zhouyi offers an inspiring and fresh take that importantly differs from previous translators approaches to the text. The Duke of Zhou Changes: A Study and Annotated Translation of the Zhouyi (Harrasso...

Ho-fung Hung‘s new book has two main goals: to to outline the historical origins of Chinas capitalist boom and the social and political formations in the 1980s that gave rise to this boom, and to explore the global effects of Chinas capitalist boom and...

Anthony Rausch‘s recent work looks closely at newspapers and journalism in modern Japan, focusing especially on the nature and significance of local newspapers. Though the local newspaper in Japan accounts for nearly half the consumption of newspapers ...

The inspiration for Robert S. Boynton‘s new book began with a photograph in the New York Times in October 2002. In the photo, two middle-aged Japanese couples and a single woman descending from a plane at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. The headline read,

First things first: Matthew H. Sommer‘s new book is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the history of China and/or the history of gender. Based on 1200 legal cases from the central and local archives of the Qing dynasty,

The Chinese Revolution was a profoundly theatrical event. Brian James DeMare’s new book explores the relationship between drama and political action in China, from the earliest era of communist Red Drama to the establishment of Mao’s cultural army and ...

Seth Jacobowitzs new book opens with a balloon ride and closes with a record-scratching cat, and in between it offers a fascinating history of Meiji media focused on technologies of writing and script. Inspired, in part,

Beverly Bossler‘s wonderful new edited volume is a must-read for anyone interested in histories of and with gender in China. Gender and Chinese History: Transformative Encounters (University of Washington Press,

Douglas Clark’s new Gunboat Justice: British and American Law Courts in China and Japan (1842-1943) (Earnshaw Books Limited, 2016) is a three-volume study of extraterritoriality and its transnational histories as it shaped modern China and Japan.

Sigrid Schmalzer‘s new book is an excellent and important contribution to both science studies and the history of China. Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (University of Chicago Press,

Jeffrey Wasserstrom‘s wonderful new book in the “China Specials” series at Penguin opens with two main premises. First, it is more important than ever to have “illuminating lenses through which to view the People’s Republic of China,

Minsoo Kang‘s new translation of The Story of Hong Gildong (Penguin Classics, 2016) is a wonderful rendering of a text that is arguably the “single most important work of classic…prose fiction of Korea.” Though Hong Gildong is a popular figure in mod...

Erik J. Hammerstrom‘s new book looks carefully at “what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century” by exploring what they wrote in articles and monographs devoted to the topic in the 1920s and early 1930s.

What role do images play in the enlightenment experience? Can Buddha images, calligraphy, mandalas, and portraits function as nodes of access for a practitioner’s experience of enlightenment? Or are these visual representations a distraction from what ...

Verge: Studies in Global Asias is an inspiring and path-breaking new journal that explores innovative forms for individual and collaborative scholarly work. I had the privilege of talking with Charlotte Eubanks, Jonathan E. Abel,

Paul Rouzer‘s new book offers a Buddhist reading of a famous collection of poems and the author associated with them, both of which were called Hanshan, or Cold Mountain. On Cold Mountain: A Buddhist Reading of the Hanshan Poems (University of Washingt...

Jeremy Brown and Matthew D. Johnson‘s new edited volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of the Mao Zedong era (1949-1978). Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Harvard UP,

“You are a member of a minority group but do not know it. How is this possible?” Christopher Bondy’s new book explores this question in a study of the making of burakumin identity in the schools and communities of young people in modern Japan. Voice,

Will Buckingham‘s new book is a wonderful cycle of stories that are inspired by and speak back to the Chinese Yijing, the Classic of Changes. Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes (Earnshaw Books, 2015) collects 64 stories,

Agnieszka Joniak-Luthi‘s new book opens with a series of questions that animate the study. They include but are not limited to: What does being Han mean to those classified as Hanzu? What are the narratives of Han-ness today?

Erica Fox Brindley‘s new book is a powerful study of the history of conceptions of ethnicity in early China that focuses on the Hua-xia and the peoples associated with its southern frontier (Yue/Viet). Informed by a careful accounting of extant textual...

Dr. Miao Li, assistant professor, Department of Sociology and School of Philosophy and Social Development at Shandong University, joins New Books in Education to discuss Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass...

Lisong Liu‘s thoughtful new book is an important and insightful read for any of us who are currently engaged in conversations about supporting the increasing numbers of international students in the North American academy.